Thornfield Hall (2 page)

Today, as I say, has decided to be different. I come along the rue Vaugirard, say good-bye to Félix—who I can see is as relieved as I am that I don't want to go off in pursuit of gingerbread, for he wants only to race back to his portraits—and I enter the house by the side door into the little paved garden. The portrait of the frowning man, deep within my pocket, cuts my leg as I walk, hard and sharp, and I can't wait to get rid of it forever. Even Monsieur Punch's cheerful call from his perch within the conservatory doesn't stop me from frowning, too, and I run up to the door from the greenhouse into the square of garden, perpetually in shadow, on which Monsieur Graff threatens to build an extension, thus ruining my and Maman's heavenly times alone together. But Jenny says she'll see to it that he never will.

“So this is our
petit bijou,
” a voice says as I open the door and run in. “I congratulate you, Céline. You have educated the child to look very like you in the face.”

My mother is half sitting, half lying on a cane chaise at the side of the conservatory. My first impression is that she's very posed, more so even than when Nadar tried to “capture” her on one of his strange-smelling plates. She looks beautiful—but nervous. She's in a sky blue chenille gown that the vicomte says makes her look like an angel. “Not since we were at the villa together,” says the man I don't dare look up at. He's in an upright chair and holds a whip with a gold handle—which reminds me, though I know Maman would be furious if I said this, of the ringmaster at the Hippodrome, when she and Jenny take me to the circus for my winter treat. He sounds amused but contemptuous at the same time. I know I hate this man. And I know, too, though of course he can
not know it, that I carry his image in the pocket of my rose pantalettes: I own him, just as, from his odious assumption that I am his and Maman's “little jewel,” he appears to be certain he owns me. In my heart I leave the house forever—but then the picture of my desolate mother returns to haunt me, and I creep back, in the cold gray dawn, to the house in the rue Vaugirard. “Well, speak up, little Adèle,” the stranger says in a voice that doesn't even attempt to be kind.

If Félix has taught me that even the tallest and burliest of men can have hearts of gold, then Pierrot, the clown who lies in order to demonstrate the truth at the core of things, has instructed me in the way mime can lead the audience astray and convince them of the opposite of what they expect. I run on tiptoe, all little-girl smiles and dimples, to the man in the green velvet jacket in the high-backed chair near where Maman, suddenly an invalid, lies. I lift my cheek to be kissed; my hands fly out behind me, like a tiny ballerina's. All the while the paper with its print from Nadar's prized wet-collodion plate bites into my thigh and nearly causes me to scream. But, like Pierrot, I am silent—and only Monsieur Punch, who has been trained by the poet Gérard to mouth obscenities in the tongue of an extinct Amazonian tribe, gives vent to his incredulity at my behavior. “That's better,” says the visitor, whose breath reeks of tobacco—and something else, too, something sweet and sickly and strong. “So you do remember our times in the white villa by the blue sea, you little monkey, the house with the steps right down to the water, eh?”

Nadar, my friend who came to our house sometimes when Maman was away in the provinces, performing in circus tents pegged on dry grass—on hot summer nights when I missed her most of all, lonely in the stifling small rooms at home—Nadar would tell me that I had just as much love in me as everyone else. “Yours is bottled up, Adèle, and you must not permit it to turn
sour,” he said. And he looked almost sad as he spoke. “You are an actress like your mother,
ma petite
, and like her you will receive blows as you go through life. But don't become a cynic—after all, Céline never has.”

I didn't know what the word meant, but I ran to the giant Nadar and reached out my arms so he could lift me high in the room and make me queen of the fussy household Jenny loved to preside over: the round tables with their collections of bibelots and enameled snuffboxes; the Récamier bed, resplendent in its upholstery of salmon velvet. “I am
not
—what you say”—I whispered in his ear, and then we both burst out laughing, though I went on to shed tears at this understanding on Nadar's part of my need for love and my desire to give it. For it is true, I feel this bottled-up sensation sometimes, and I know that my mimicry and precious airs come to me as a guard against my real, true love. Nadar it is who saves me from the bad parts of myself. But Nadar, as I know too well, is not here with me today. And the strong effect the stranger's words about his white villa by the blue sea have had on me will have to go unexplained until I see my friend again.

At this point—and just as I was noticing the fact that this dark, ugly stranger held my mother's whip in his hand, the elegant little whip that had been her mother's and grandmother's, the whip with the Japanese inlaid handle and streamer of blue ribbon, employed by Céline's family of acrobats and trainers since the early days of the Funambules Theatre—the door leading to the inner salon opened, and Jenny came in. She must have seen me reaching out for the fine-thonged whip, which had tamed so many of the horses and ponies Céline's grandmother rode bareback on a circle of hot sand, standing tall while the tightrope walkers swayed above them. Jenny looked around the scented, overfurnished conservatory, and I saw she was angry. I also saw she hates the man who both pushes me away and drew me onto his knee: she pulled
me from him abruptly and set me down in the salon, with a warning that I'd be put to bed without a visit from Maman if I didn't go straight up to my room and settle myself down instantly. The whip, I saw to my surprise (later, when I looked back on this scene: Maman prostrate and pink in the face, the visitor both abashed and arrogant, I wondered at her permitting him to take it from the glass cabinet where, along with other paraphernalia of circus days, it was proudly displayed), the whip was handed to Jenny, by the man I refused to accept as my father, and replaced. I heard the door of the cabinet close as I went up the stairs, dragging my feet. But I was afraid Jenny would catch me and vent this new anger on me, so I arrived in the little chamber at the top of the stairs and climbed into bed without a murmur. It was a long time since I'd tried to go to sleep in the room designated as mine when Céline was first given “this charming hotel,” as she had said of the house in rue Vaugirard. Bettina the maid was out, Tante Irène on the floor below closed in with her feathers and artificial flowers and unable to hear me if I cried for company. I had spent too long on the chaise next to my mother's room. That evening I had the first premonition that Maman might leave me (though there was no reason to suppose this; I knew she had arranged within the past week to sing with a new musician, whose opera would be staged at the theater), and I suffered a devastation of loneliness that appeared to me, in my ever-growing distress, to presage a future that would be unbearably different from the past.

I hadn't lain there for more than an hour (though it seemed an age to me) when a light step on the stair announced Maman herself, contrite and breathless, as if she had been saving up all the things she wanted to say to me and realized she must speak soon before I lost my trust in her. “Adèle, are you awake?” Her voice was low and uncertain, and I felt a tremor of apprehension run through me: was the announcement of a long journey abroad
about to be made? Buenos Aires, or the fabulous East—I had heard Maman and Jenny dream aloud, on evenings when hard gray rain came down on the roof of the conservatory. Paris was the same gray wherever you looked. They would go without me, I knew, to the green jungles where Monsieur Punch's family of parrots darted between tall trees. I would be left alone, with Maman's friends looking in to the house in rue Vaugirard less and less often now that the woman they all loved was no longer there.

“Yes, I'm awake, Maman,” I replied. “What time is it?” And I pretended, by yawning and slowly opening and closing my eyes, that I had been asleep all along.

“It's not late,” Maman said, “not for you anyway—and I am sorry you were sent upstairs,
ma chérie.
But things are not so easy here always, you know….” And here her voice tailed off, and she fell silent.

I know
—this is what I wished to say, but my mother spoke again in a rush of words I had never heard from her before. “I have my work, and I have my child”—here she reached out and took my hand, and I felt her fingers strong and slim against mine. “And there are those who like to take Céline Varens to dinner or to a box at the opera, for the pleasure of watching the reaction of the crowd.”

“Maman est belle,”
I said—and I knew as I spoke that my mother's beauty meant little to her, and that she wished to tell me what really lay in her heart.

“There is one man who cannot leave me—though he does, very often, return to his life and estates across the sea.”

“Do you love him, Maman?” I heard my voice cry out in alarm. And—fatally—“When will the milord leave again? I hope he will go soon….”

“He wishes me to leave with him,” my mother replied, and her voice was tight with the hurt I had just inflicted on her. “But Paris holds all my friends, my theater”—and here, forgiven as I always
was, I found myself scooped up and hugged and kissed—“and
ma petite
Adèle. She is happy here with me,
non
?”

“Yes, yes,” I whispered, still held close to the soft, powdered cheek of Céline. “Happy here…”

So it was, when my mother had kissed me a hundred times more and had run down the stairs again, that I felt secure in the knowledge of her love and in the continuation of our life together. Everything would go on being exactly the same. So, as I tried to lull myself into a real sleep, I taught myself to believe.

Inevitably, as I lay in the minute four-poster with its rosy coverlet and muslin hangings, I now found myself transported to that realm—the past—that my busy, happy life had obliterated up until now. I saw myself on a path with bushes that bore yellow flowers but were prickly to the touch, and from the path I came to a flight of shallow stone steps, these bordered by the same profusion of gorse and broom. The steps led downward—to my childish eye there seemed to be a hundred of them—and at the base, as far away and tiny as the painted glass of a scene trapped in a dome (I owned one of these, a Paris snowstorm, Notre Dame blanketed with fine white flakes at the toss of a hand), lay the sea. I had never seen the sea in my life, and I stopped dead in my tracks. It was my misfortune also to turn and look behind me. I felt alone in this great empty landscape, with water stretching to the horizon.

A white villa—I have heard Maman speak of it sometimes, so I know this is where we went that summer when I can have been no more than two or three years old—stood proudly at the top of the path. Palm trees and an orange grove partly obscured it from view, and a fine heat haze caused it to shimmer like a palace in a fairy tale. Unsure whether to press ahead in the direction of the vast enigma of the sea or to retrace my steps, I stood rooted to the spot, my eyes fixed behind me on the figure of the man now visible as he
descended the roughest part of the path and made for the flight of stone stairs.

The man was my father. Maman had spent the last day since we arrived teaching me to say “Papa” (a word I somehow knew would make Jenny show her contempt). And this strange man with whom I was instructed to be so familiar was naked on the narrow path. He stooped, caught by my grave regard in the act of dropping his breeches, and I saw he held in his hand a pair of trunks into which he now proceeded to thrust a pair of hairy legs. He muttered something, which sounded like an apology. Then, “What are you doing out here on your own, little one?” And he came forward to lift me and ran with great, lurching steps down the flight of stairs to a flat rock that jutted out into the sea. Here my screams prevented him from diving in with me headfirst, and Maman, who sat perched up above the rock with a parasol held high in the air, called out for my release. But I felt that this cowardice on my part turned the ugly man against me, and sure enough, later when I lay in my bed at the villa, listening to the wind in the pines at the back of the house, I heard Maman pleading for me, with this stranger who carried something like a cudgel between his legs, for this I had seen on the path. “Let her stay here, Edouard,” came the voice of the woman who was the toast of Paris, the beautiful opera dancer Céline Varens. I squirmed at the piteous tone she employed in begging to keep me in the white villa by the sea. I had never heard Maman speak like this before, and I didn't know it was the voice of abasement and love.

Until this evening I had forgotten the ugly man and his nakedness, the tears of my mother, and the great pine with its umbrella branches soughing in the wind at the back of the house. But now, as I wait hour after hour for Maman to mount the stairs and tell me the coast is clear and I can return to the chaise in her boudoir
and at last find comfort and sleep, it all returns to me with the black-inked certainty of one of Félix's portraits of a frozen past. I must have dropped off to sleep in the end, I suppose, for it is morning and a bright Easter sun comes through the curtains. I run down to the boudoir—there is no one there—and then to the salon, which smells of Jenny's café au lait, as always. Here is Jenny on her own: the house in rue Vaugirard is empty, and Jenny says Maman has gone to the theater early, to rehearse. The man who came last night isn't mentioned at all. Apart from a lingering whiff of tobacco in the conservatory, there is no sign he ever
was
here. Félix's portrait of him I had not in the end thrown away; instead I had stowed it in the little chest in my bedroom where I keep my secret things.